“Out of the question.” Hand went back to watching what the archaeologue was doing. “We can’t risk exposure at this stage.”
“Or damage to the gate,” Wardani said sharply.
“Or damage to the gate,” agreed the executive. “I’m afraid your team are going to have to work with the cavern as it is, Captain. I don’t believe there’s any risk involved. The bracing the previous visitors put in appears to be solid.”
“I’ve seen the bracing,” said Sutjiadi. “Bonding epoxy is not a substitute for a permanent structure, but that’s—”
“Sergeant Hansen seemed quite impressed with it.” Hand’s urbane tone was edged with irritation. “But if you are concerned, please feel free to reinforce the current arrangement in any way you see fit.”
“I was going to say,” Sutjiadi said evenly, “that the bracing is beside the point. I am not concerned with the risks of collapse. I am urgently concerned with what is in the cavern.”
Wardani looked up from her sketching.
“Well, that’s good, Captain,” she said brightly. “You’ve gone from polite disbelief to urgent concern in less than twenty-four hours of real time. What exactly are you concerned about?”
Sutjiadi looked uncomfortable.
“This artifact,” he said. “You claim it’s a gate. Can you give me any guarantees that nothing will come through it from the other side?”
“Not really, no.”
“Do you have any idea what might come through?”
Wardani smiled. “Not really, no.”
“Then I’m sorry, Mistress Wardani. It makes military sense to have the Nagini’s main weaponry trained on it at all times.”
“This is not a military operation, Captain.” Hand was working on ostentatiously bored now. “I thought I made that clear during briefing. You are part of a commercial venture, and the specifics of our commerce dictate that the artifact cannot be exposed to aerial view until it is contractually secured. By the terms of the Incorporation Charter, that will not become the case until what is on the other side of the gateway is tagged with a Mandrake ownership buoy.”
“And if the gate chooses to open before we are ready, and something hostile comes through it?”
“Something hostile?” Wardani set aside her memoryboard, apparently amused. “Something such as what?”
“You would be in a better position than I to evaluate that, Mistress Wardani,” Sutjiadi said stiffly. “My concern is simply for the safety of this expedition.”
Wardani sighed.
“They weren’t vampires, Captain,” she said wearily.
“I’m sorry?”
“The Martians. They weren’t vampires. Or demons. They were just a technologically advanced race with wings. That’s all. There’s nothing on the other side of that thing”—she stabbed a finger in the general direction of the rocks—“that we won’t be able to build ourselves in a few thousand years. If we can get a lock on our militaristic tendencies, that is.”
“Is that intended as an insult, Mistress Wardani?”
“Take it any way you like, Captain. We are, all of us, already, dying slowly of radiation poisoning. A couple of dozen kilometers in that direction a hundred thousand people were vaporized yesterday. By soldiers.” Her voice was starting to rise, trembling at base. “Anywhere else on about sixty percent of this planet’s landmass, your chances of an early, violent death are excellent. At the hands of soldiers. Elsewhere, the camps will kill you with starvation or beatings if you step out of political line. This service, too, brought to us by soldiers. Is there something else I can add to clarify my reading of militarism for you?”
“Mistress Wardani.” Hand’s voice held a tight strain I hadn’t heard before. Below the ramp, Hansen, Schneider, and Jiang had stopped what they were doing and were looking over toward the raised voices. “I think we’re getting off the point. We were discussing security.”
“Were we?” Wardani forced a shaky laugh, and her voice evened out. “Well, Captain. Let me put it to you that in the seven decades I have been a qualified archaeologue, I have never come across evidence to suggest that the Martians had anything more unpleasant to offer than what men like you have already unleashed across the face of Sanction Four. Excluding the small matter of the fallout from Sauberville, you are probably safer sitting in front of that gate than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere at the moment.”
There was a small silence.
“Maybe you want to train the Nagini’s main guns on the entrance to the cavern,” I suggested. “Same effect. In fact, with the remote monitoring in place, it’ll be better. If the monsters with half-meter fangs turn up, we can collapse the tunnel on them.”
“A good point.” Seemingly casual, Hand moved to position himself carefully in the hatch between Wardani and Sutjiadi. “That seems the best compromise, does it not, Captain?”
Sutjiadi read the executive’s stance and took the hint. He threw a salute and turned on his heel. As he went down the ramp past me, he glanced up. He didn’t quite have his previous immobility of feature down with the new Maori face. He looked betrayed.
You find innocence in the strangest places.
At the base of the ramp he caught one of the gull corpses with his foot and stumbled slightly. He kicked the clump of feathers away from him in a spray of turquoise sand.
“Hansen,” he snapped tightly. “Jiang. Get all this shit off the beach. I want it cleared back two hundred meters from the ship on all sides.”
Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn’t looking—he’d already stalked away toward the water’s edge.
Something wasn’t right.
• • •
Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition’s grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a skirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the Nagini, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath, and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated, and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each ’fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms separated by a central living space, but two of the units had been assembled in a nonstandard configuration with half the bed space, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani’s lab.
I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.
The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.
“What do you want?” she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.
“It’s me.”
“I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?”
“An invitation over the threshold?”
She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.
“We’re not in virtual anymore, Kovacs. I—”
“I wasn’t looking for a fuck.”
She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. “That’s just as well.”
“So do I get to come in?”
“Suit yourself.”
I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme: sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.
“Getting anywhere?”
“Slowly.” She yawned. “I don’t remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.”
I propped myself against a table edge.
“So how long do you reckon?”
She shrugged. “A couple of days. Then there’s testing.”
“How long for that?”
“The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don’t know. Why
? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?”
I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131, and all their numerous friends, like a ’methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jeweled presence.
I twitched despite myself.
“I’m just curious.”
“An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.”
I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. “I think you’re confusing curiosity with empathy.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Curiosity’s a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn’t make you a better human being.”
“Well, I suppose you’d know.”
It was an admirable riposte. I didn’t know if she’d been tortured in the camp—in the momentary flare of anger I hadn’t cared—but she never flinched as the words came out.
“Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?”
“I told you, we’re not in virtual anymore.”
“No.”
I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Kovacs,” she said heavily. “Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know, I know, we didn’t do it, but it’s a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that’s without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I’m sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.”
“You won’t want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.”
“Is there something to talk about?” She didn’t look around.
“Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there’s not a great deal else left to work from.” I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. “I’m told there are tests we can do with bone at the cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to tell us anything, either.”
That got her looking at me.
“Why?”
“Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.” I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. “And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.”
“You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?” she asked scornfully. “The vampires got them?”
“Something got them,” I said mildly. “They didn’t die of old age. Their stacks are gone.”
“Doesn’t that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily. Any civilization that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitize consciousness.”
“There’s no actual evidence for that.”
“Not even common sense?”
“Common sense?” The scorn was back in her voice. “The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that obviously the sun goes around the Earth, just look at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.”
“I’ve heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.”
“Yeah, haven’t we all,” she said shortly. “Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit resleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.”
“In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.”
“No, it’s a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there’s very little hard evidence around to disprove it.”
“Do you believe it?”
She sighed and went back to her seat. “Of course I don’t believe it. I’m just trying to demonstrate that there’s more to eat at this party than the cozy little certainties human science is handing around. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that’s after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living room wall.” She paused. “And it’s probably upside down.”
I laughed out loud. It shattered the tension in the ’fab. Wardani’s face twitched in an unwilling smile.
“No, I mean it,” she muttered. “You think, just because I can open this gate, that we’ve got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven’t. You can’t assume anything here. You can’t think in human terms.”
“Okay, fine.” I followed her back to the center of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando—the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind—was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. “But you’re the one who’s beginning to sound like a vampire story now.”
“I’m just warning you.”
“Okay, I’m warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?”
“Outside my own team?” She considered. “We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artifact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.”
“You know Hand says there’s no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.”
“Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.”
“Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.”
“I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk. Another obelisk. We’d already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.”
“And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?”
“No.” She gave me a crooked smile. “The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realized what we’d found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.”
“And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?”
“Got it in one.” She shrugged. “It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don’t know if you’d understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, trashed because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.”
I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.
“It sounds familiar enough.”
“I think—” She hesitated. “—I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I’d be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition o
f my work.” She smiled. “I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don’t remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.”
She sighed and rid herself of the smile.
“The next morning, we started to think straight. Started to think about what was really going to happen. We knew that if we filed, we’d lose control. The Guild would fly in a Master with all the right political affiliations to take charge of the project, and we’d be sent home with a pat on the back. Oh, we’d be back from the academic wilderness, of course, but only at a price. We’d be allowed to publish, but only after careful vetting to make sure there wasn’t too much Wycinski in the text. There’d be work, but not on an independent basis. Consultancy”—she pronounced the word as if it tasted bad—“on someone else’s projects. We’d be well paid, but paid to keep quiet.”
“Better than not getting paid at all.”
A grimace. “If I’d wanted to work second shovel to some smooth-faced politically appropriate fuck with half my experience and qualifications, I could have gone to the plains like everybody else. The whole reason I was out here in the first place was because I wanted my own dig. I wanted the chance to prove that something I believed in was right.”
“Did the others feel that strongly?”
“In the end. In the beginning, they signed up with me because they needed the work and at the time no one else was hiring Scratchers. But a couple of years living with contempt changes you. And they were young, most of them. That gives you energy for your anger.”
I nodded.
“Could that be who we found in the nets?”
She looked away. “I suppose so.”
“How many were there on the team? People who could have come back here and opened the gate?”
“I don’t know. About half a dozen of them were actually Guild-qualified; there were probably two or three of those who could have. Aribowo. Weng, maybe. Dhasanapongsakul. They were all good. But on their own? Working backward from our notes, working together?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Kovacs. It was. A different time. A team thing. I’ve got no idea how any of those people would perform under different circumstances. Kovacs, I don’t even know how I’ll perform anymore.”